Discovering Snowflake, AZ

“Moe, I love Snowflake!” I exclaimed.

I had taken the girls up to visit him while he was elk hunting in the middle of September, 2003. He always set up a trailer and spent the full two weeks of archery season. The girls and I drove up to see him in the middle of the hunt.

“I can see you're busy,” I told him not long after we got there, “so I think we'll head on over to Snowflake to see Linda's new house, OK?”

“Have fun,” he said as he kissed us goodby. I don't think he was particularly hurt that we were leaving. Elk hunting takes a lot of concentration.

I had an idea of how to get to Snowflake from where Moe was hunting, but had never driven there before. Linda had told me to drive to Winslow, then turn east. I got that far OK, and we needed gas, so I decided to ask for directions at the gas station.

“Can you tell me the way to Snowflake?” I asked a nice looking boy behind the counter

“Where?” he wanted to know.

“Snowflake,” I told him. “I know you go to Holbrook, then turn south on the road to Show Low. It's supposed to go through Snowflake, but how do I get to Holbrook?”

“That's easy,” he told me. “Just get on the freeway heading east. It's less than an hour from here. But I've never heard of Snowflake. Hey, Joe, do you know where Snowflake is?”

Another fellow, a little bit older, looked around at us and shrugged his shoulders. “Nope,” he answered.

There were two other men in the store, but they weren't any help either. It kind of surprised me that none of them had ever heard of Snowflake, but I wasn't really worried. I knew it had to be there. Linda had moved there, after.

I found Holbrook without any trouble, and signs that told me where to turn south to go to Show Low, but nothing said anything about Snowflake. Oh well. Linda had said it was on that road, so I hoped it was.

Sure enough, Snowflake was right where it was supposed to be. I couldn't have missed it if I'd tried.

“The people in Winslow have never heard of Snowflake,” I told my sister Linda when we got to her new house, “they acted like I was crazy.”

“That's because they lived in Winslow,” she assured me.

I loved Linda's house. She and Alan had moved the previous year, when Alan began practicing medicine in his home town. They had built a big, beautiful house right off the main street, and it was lovely. Linda was busy planting trees and landscaping her back yard, which I was very jealous of. She already had thick green grass, pine trees and aspen, and I wanted a yard like hers.

“Wouldn't it be fun to be able to have flowers all summer, cool shady trees, and a lush yard to enjoy?” I told Moe on the phone that night when he called to see if we'd made it alright. “I want to live in Snowflake!”

Moe didn't understand my enthusiasm for the pretty little town until he came with me to visit Linda and Alan a month later. Then he got the bug, too. There was just something enchanting about the quaint community nestled in the little green valley beside Silver Creek.

Snowflake consisted of one long main street, stretching through the middle of the valley for two or three miles. All the businesses were on that main street, while quiet neighborhoods meandered up and down hills behind it on either side. There was one stop light on the north end of main street, and that was all. On the south end of town the street climbed a hill, then dropped down into an huge, pastoral meadow. It was called Belly Button. Really. There was even a sign proclaiming that we were in Belly Button, USA. The meadow divided Snowflake from it's tiny sister city, Taylor, on the other side. They also had one stop light. It was such a cute place!

“Maybe we should start looking for land up there,” Moe told me as we drove home from that visit. “I can see us retiring in Snowflake.”

So could I.